Acer Aspire Timelinex 5830TG - Affordable Sandy Bridge laptop

The Acer Aspire TimelineX 5830TG comes at a very affordable price of Rs. 40,990. We call it affordable as it has a good Sandy Bridge processor, its aesthetics are brilliant for the price and it performs well in most tests as compared to the other entry level Sandy Bridge laptop we tested this month. Although it may seem a bit on the higher side for students, we would still recommend it to those who are looking at purchasing a new affordable laptop.

Pros

• NVIDIA Optimus technology
• USB Power off charging
• Affordably priced

Cons

• Monitor has poor viewing angles
• Video encoding is slow

 

 

 

Acer Aspire TimelineX series of notebooks have undergone a model refresh after the introduction of Sandy Bridge processors which has added to the computing power. This line was showcased at this year's CeBIT and has three models namely the 3830TG, 4830TG and 5830TG for the 13-inch, 14-inch and 15.6-inch model respectively. We got our hands on the 15.6-inch Acer Aspire TimlelineX 5830TG.

Look and Feel:

The first thing that attracted me to the laptop was the clean cobalt blue matte finish on the top with the embossed silver Acer logo. Apart from the slight bit of tapering at the two edges, the lid has a minimal design elements. The display hinges are placed outward in effect providing more stability to the monitor.

Chiclet Keyboard	Isolated Keys

On opening the lid you will notice that the cobalt blue finish continues on the palm rest. The keypad comprises a black chiclet keyboard on a silver plate. A complete numeric keypad is present on the right hand side, so the mouse trackpad is located off centre. Above the keypad you have the speaker section which is slightly raised from the keypad section and looks aesthetically pleasing thanks to the finely minute openings for the sound to emanate from. The power button is located on the left hand side.

There are a variety of connectivity ports on either side. On the left hand side you have the LAN port, VGA port just below the air vent, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port and the audio and mic jacks. Coming to the right hand side, you will come across three USB 2.0 ports and a DVD drive. A power connector port is placed just beside the DVD drive. This may cause the power cord to sometimes block the DVD tray as you eject it, if the power cord is not pointing in the direction opposite the keypad. On the left hand side of the front edge just below the palm rest, you will notice the status indicators with an SD card slot.

There is a silver button with a battery symbol which provides charging for devices such as phones, PMPs etc even when the laptop is switched off. I couldn't find much information on how it achieves this, but i am guessing that there is a separate battery that charges when you have your laptop plugged in and when your laptop is off, the charge on this battery is used to charge devices.

Right Edge	Left Edge	Battery Meter
Glossy Screen	Speaker Design	Numpad & Arrow Keys

Under the hood:

The labelling on the palm rest gives a you quick specifications of the laptop. The Acer 5830TG houses the Intel Core i5-2410M Sandy bridge processor clocked at 2.3 GHz and capable of scaling upto 2.9 GHz using Turbo Boost 2.0 technology. The monitor as told above is an 15.6-inch LED backlit LCD monitor with a maximum resolution of 1366x768 pixels. The 5830TG has a 500GB hard drive (which can be upgraded to 750GB) and has 3GB DDR3 RAM.

This model houses the NVIDIA GT540M graphics solution and supports the NVIDIA Optimus technology which allows you to switch between integrated Sandy Bridge graphics and discrete NVIDIA graphics. Using the NVIDIA control panel, you can select from three modes: Auto - this mode selects the iGPU or dGPU depending on the workload; High Performance NVIDIA processor - selects the NVIDIA GT 540M graphics for all tasks and Integrated graphics - selects the integrated Sandy Bridge graphics for all tasks.

This laptop battery has a recharge cycle of 1000 charges which should be good for at least two years.